Articles

If you have read the section on search engine optimization you will know that in order to get traffic from search engines, you need lots of links to your site from hundreds, if not thousands, of sites, depending on how competitive your main keywords are. You can do this by reciprocal link exchanges, but this can take a long time, plus the fact that search engines place more importance on one-way links than two-way links.

So what's the best way of getting plenty of one-way links? Submitting your sites to directories is a good start, but you should also write articles and submit them to article directories. Search engines love sites that have fresh and constantly updated content, and therefore webmasters are always on the look out for fresh content that they can add to their site. Ezine publishers, also, are always looking for articles they can include in the latest edition of their ezine. Finding and importing articles from article banks (providing they leave the article intact and include your resource box with your link of course) is a great way of doing this. 

Now this may seem daunting to a lot of webmasters but if you want thousands of one-way links then this is the best way to go about it. You needn't write long essays for every article, it could be just 300-500 words, which you could easily do in less than an hour. I can usually knock up a good quality 500+ word article in this time. If you're not a good writer, then you can always hire someone to do it for you from a site like elance.

These links will give you higher search engine rankings, plus you will of course get plenty of traffic directly from the people who read your articles, and then click on your link to your site for more information. If you write a couple of articles every week or even one per day, then over time as more and more sites pick up your articles the number of inward links to your site will rise dramatically, and your articles will literally be all over the internet in numerous different places. I personally write a few articles each week for each of my sites. I think it's better to focus on quality rather than quantity. It's better to write two top-quality articles every week than one mediocre article every day. People will respect your articles and your opinions more this way.

Let me explain how it works. Ideally your site should have lots of content and different subjects you can write about. A good example would be if your site is about cars. There are endless things you could write about, such as how to choose a car, all the different aspects of car maintenence, new car reviews, etc. 

Let's assume you've just written your first article on one of these subjects. You can now manually submit your article to as many article directories as you can find for maximum exposure. Two of the larger, most popular ones are goarticles and ezinearticles. Just open a free account, and then copy and paste your article, including a compelling title, a brief description of the article if required, state what category your article falls under, and write a small bio about yourself with a link to your site.

This bio or resource box at the end of the article is extremely important as it tells the reader about yourself, and includes the crucial link back to your site. This link should include anchor text, if the directory allows HTML, with your main keyword(s), to help achieve the long-term goal of high search engine rankings. Make sure you mix them up from time to time, as you don't want hundreds of inward links all with the same anchor text. See the search engine optimization section for more information.

Now if you're submitting each article you write manually to each individual article directory you will soon find out that this is extremely time consuming. There is a fantastic company that I use that you can submit your article to, and they will submit your article for you to over 30,000 publishers, which includes all the major article directories that I mentioned earlier in this article, like goarticles and ezinearticles, saving you hours of time. The best thing of all is that for a one-time payment you can submit as many articles as you like, and you only need to submit each article once. They will take care of the distribution. The name of this company is Article Marketer.